MADRAS, India -- A homicide is the murder of an individual. A genocide is the murder of an ethnicity. The purpose of a genocide is beyond doubt: cleansing society of what the powers that be consider undesirable. History's most famous -- or infamous -- purge was carried out in Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler sent 6 million Jews to the gas chamber in the evil hope of ridding his nation of an "inferior race." He believed in Aryan supremacy.
There have been many other brutal attempts at annihilation. In the closing years of the 1800s, Armenians carried out mass killings in eastern Turkey. This was followed by a tit-for-tat attempt at wiping out Armenians in Ottoman Turkey around 1915.
Cambodian dictator Pol Pot butchered nearly 2 million people between 1975 and 1979. The victims were thought to be ideologically "incompatible" (read: intellectuals) with the savage regime.